Vacation in a Crater

My grandmother, who is crazy, drove me to the airport when I went on vacation. She was singing a song about how crazy the world was before she came along.... Disguise the elemental with the glamourous she said.

The thing I remember most about my vacation was swimming back and forth across a spring that I thought was deep but when the sun shone all the way to the bottom of it I saw that the spring was dish-shaped, like a crater, in fact for all practical purposes it was a crater, right here on earth. I sat and stared at its pockmarks for a long time before climbing the hill back to the highway that led me to a slum tenement house in the Bronx. The landlord, who was advertising apartments for rent, had the place rigged so that the doors opened themselves automatically when people passed by, and set off a prerecorded audio tape that described various features of the apartment, in particular the bathroom. One had to buy the bathroom fixtures, but they were hooked up to a never-ending water supply, which was none other than the crater. There were musicians in the lobby of the slum and a woman was taking orders for tapes in the video store there, the code numbers of which she knew by heart.